NRC hires resident inspector for troubled Plymouth nuke plant

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has hired a new resident inspector for the troubled Pilgrim power station.

Chris Burrell

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has hired a new resident inspector for the troubled Pilgrim nuclear power station.

The shake-up at the 685-megawatt nuclear plant comes a month after federal regulators downgraded Pilgrim’s performance rating and stepped up inspections.

But the NRC said Thursday that the decision to replace one of two resident inspectors at Pilgrim has nothing to do with its degraded performance in the last year.

“Not at all,” said NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci when asked if the departure of resident inspector Brian P. Smith had anything to do with Pilgrim’s string of unplanned shutdowns this year.

Screnci said inspectors “routinely move” to other nuclear power plants. The new resident inspector, Brian Scrabeck, most recently worked for the NRC as a project engineer but was employed from 2008 to 2012 as a senior reactor operator at the James A. FitzPatrick nuclear plant in New York, the NRC said.

FitzPatrick is also owned by Entergy Corp., the Louisiana-based company that owns Pilgrim. FitzPatrick station has a similar reactor and containment system to Pilgrim and has also been rated by the NRC for the last year as an underperforming plant.

Mary Lampert, founder of a local watchdog group Pilgrim Watch, criticized the NRC’s hiring of Scrabeck, saying his previous employment with Entergy means he will be biased.

“It’s a conflict of interest,” said Lampert. “He has worked with that company intimately and probably knows people there. That relationship can affect objectivity.”

NRC decision to downgrade Pilgrim’s performance was linked to an unplanned shutdown of the plant in August. Another unplanned shutdown – known as a scram – at Pilgrim in October will put the plant into an even smaller category of nuclear plants in the country considered by the NRC to be “degraded.” That list now stands at seven plants.

The NRC uses a color-coded rating system that ranks adequately performing plants as green and troubled ones as white.

“At the conclusion of the fourth quarter, Pilgrim will likely have two white inputs contributing to the initiating-events cornerstone, transitioning Pilgrim into the degraded cornerstone,” the NRC wrote in a letter to Pilgrim last month.